Climate Change and Virtue Ethics

Abstract

Over the past two decades, virtue ethicists have begun to devote increasing attention to applied ethics. In particular, the application of virtue ethical frameworks to the environmental ethics debate has flourished. This chapter reviews recent contributions to the literature in this field and highlights some strengths and weaknesses of thinking about climate change through a virtue ethical lens. In section 1, I explore two benefits of applying virtue ethics to climate change: (a) we can better capture the phenomenology of our moral experience, and (b) we avoid the problem of inconsequentialism. In section 2, I analyse various practical proposals that have been put forward in the form of specific environmental virtues. In section 3, I reconstruct a fundamental objection to the idea of using a virtue ethical normative approach to tackling the urgent and imminent dangers of climate change.